ON HABITS OF OBSERVING. 29 



impossible to get an accompanying- friend, on such 

 an occasion, to be sensible of some note, uttered 

 by a particular bird, perhaps close at hand, which 

 was to ourselves perfectly audible. The attention, 

 also, of an habitual observer is more and more ar- 

 rested by little things, which formerly, though they 

 might have been noticed, would have made no im- 

 pression, nor called up a single reflection in the 

 mind. We remember once being much struck with 

 the acuteness in this respect of a great philosopher, 

 whose senses, perhaps, were more practised and 

 awake than those of almost any person that ever 

 lived, and who was no less close and accurate an 

 observer in natural history, than in those higher 

 departments of science, to which he more particu- 

 larly devoted himself, and which he cultivated 

 with so much success.* Walking with him one 

 day in the country, and discoursing on the dif- 

 ferent objects that fell under our view, his eyes 

 turned suddenly to the ground, his attention being 

 arrested by the appearance of some minute specks, 

 scattered here and there, which he was not satisfied 

 till he had taken up and examined. They proved 

 to be only the excrement of some small caterpil- 

 lars feeding upon a tree overhead, from the branches 



* The allusion made above, is to the late Dr. Wollaston ; of 

 whom it has been well observed in a recent publication, " Inerat 

 etiam Wollastono ea perspicacitas, ut qua communi hominum sensui 

 parum obvia essent, ea statim ammo arriperet atque complecteretur." 

 (Dr. Daubeny's Harveian Oration, 1845, p. 11.) This remark 

 referring to his quickness of mind, might have been quite as justly 

 applied to the quickness of his senses. 



